Becoming an expert against your will

When you become a mom you magically learn how to run a committee

Summer is the opposite of relaxing for many parents, but my husband and I were saying how much more chill this season is compared to school because we are off from our school “jobs,” which in my case includes aggressive twice-a-year fundraising/thank-you-note-writing/envelope-stuffing for teacher thank-you gifts.

This is still a bit more chill than at kids’ former school, where I became achingly familiar with how Queen of Hearts fundraisers are run, how hard it is to get businesses to make donations to your school fundraiser when every other school is also hitting them up, how to do a personalized-school-paver-to-raise-money-for-the-playground thing, how to take minutes during a school board meeting when the principal is crying, and how to run a virtual children’s magic show to raise money for the annual fund during a pandemic.

When I was a kid, my mom was part of a group of families that helped transition two Catholic schools into one. She served on the school board and did a lot of fundraising. She was a SAHM (back then: “housewife.”). I took it for granted, as many kids do, that she had the time/know-how to do this kind of work just because she was a mom. I didn’t come to appreciate, ‘til later in life, how much skill and knowledge it takes to make a school run on the parent-support side. I assumed it was just the act of showing up that took care of most of the business, but no. I realized how much more absurd this can get when I spoke to a witch who found herself on the facilities committee at her kids’ school and suddenly had to learn how a 100-year-old huge building works. Her background is in marketing, not engineering, architecture, or custodial services.

This “system,” of course, fails school populations where caretakers can’t afford to break off this type of time and talent or have the patience to learn new skills and work together with strangers. What really grinds my gears is when I do freelance work for a big consulting agency and realize how obscenely people get paid for similar types of work but for non-school clients (a fancy word for the school-combining my mom did, or perhaps helping your school get on a new CMS is “organizational change.”) Do you know how many Box(es) of Joe you could buy at that pay grade? A lot.

Here are some other stories from witches who didn’t mean to but became very good at running shit, for free, after they had kids:

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I became the president of the HOA because the pavement on our streets was 25 years old and deteriorating, and my kids couldn't ride their bikes on it without falling and getting scraped up. So now I know all about the differences between seal coating and repaving asphalt, something I truly never wanted to know.

It’s so cringe to be the HOA president. The guy who held the post for the last 25 years let everything fall into disrepair in the common spaces. No one else was stepping up, so I finally raised my hand to do more unpaid work.

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Running the annual book fair is easy, they said. It practically runs itself. Fast forward a few months later and I've contributed many many hours of my life enduring ‘required’ phone calls with the vendor, dodging the deluge of ads that slow down the our online volunteer signup tool and trying to remember to jot down notes so that I can transmit them to the next project lead...whom I need to recruit.

Some of it has been rewarding — I’ve made some new friends and gotten to witness the angel-on-Earth energy of the school librarian in person, and the PTO gave a free book to every student and teacher — but I’ve also felt gross and conflicted throughout, because: capitalism! And of course — though I made sure we blew our sales # from last year out of the water — I likely won't put any of this on my resume, because: sexism!

I really LOVED being in the school library. And I felt the privilege and the luxury of it, and I sat there almost weeping in the safe bubble of it, wanting to write an op-ed about how important librarians and school libraries are. I still keep meaning to do that. And at the same time, I feel conflicted about whether we should do the fair at all, and it made me want to go back and binge-listen to every episode of the Integrated Schools podcast, and and and all the things.

P.S. Exactly one out of the 20+ people who signed up to volunteer was a man.

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As an underemployed mother in America, I joined the PTA at my kids’ school to make mom friends and to feel productive and, of course, to curry favor with the teachers and admin.

Turns out that running PTA shit is an actual (unpaid) job. I was in charge of fundraising for two years and a) priced out school-logo swag to give as incentives to donors while maintaining my profit margins, b) created a badass multi-tab spreadsheet where I learned how to make PIVOT TABLES and c) raised $30K each year.

Am I a businesswoman now? Yes, yes I am. I went on to be president, and now I can do anything. I can chair an ice cream social for 1600 people over three days in my sleep. I am extroverting my introvert self like never before for my kids. Most importantly, I am putting all this shit on my resume! And I tell other hardworking witchy moms to stop gaslighting themselves about their capabilities and get work-world credit for this kind of invisible labor, too.

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Without knowing a thing about soccer (aside from having watched Ted Lasso and the David Beckham documentary), I stepped up to coach my son’s team when no one else would do it. I got a book from the library and watched a few YouTube tutorials. We only ended up winning one game all season (turns out strategy is hard), but we all learned a lot about resiliency and the importance of showing up. Crazy how official a grown-up becomes when given a whistle!

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In learning how to advocate for my twice-exceptional kid, I am inadvertently becoming an expert in state and federal laws regarding special education and giftedness. I now know so much more about state mandates than I ever wanted to, and I am considering pivoting my career into disability rights advocacy.

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I was a philosophy major, but I have a master's in everything relevant to my son’s care, including obscure GI medications and gestalt language processing. I don’t want to be the most informed person in the room on these topics, but I often am when we have IEP meetings and doctor appointments.

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From Laura McComb-DiPesa:

I’m a mom of two boys, ages 5 and 9, living in Brooklyn, NY, currently also caring for my elderly mother, who has the beginnings of dementia, since my dad died in early April, until I find a suitable assisted living facility for her. I work as a social worker and therapist.

I’ve been spending most days entirely driven by making written and mental task lists, then monitoring, tracking, prioritizing, executing, adjusting, and re-grouping those tasks. “Tasks” includes household tasks such as food-procurement, cooking, noticing what chores need to happen, doing them or assigning them to husband/kid. There’s a heavy load of financial tasks, because in addition to my own money management, I am also submitting forms to my dad’s bank/retirement accounts and life insurance, and paying my mom’s bills. Medical tasks include scheduling and escorting my kids and mom to doctors appointments and overseeing their medications, and even a new type of task, pet care, which has involved finding first a cat sitter and then a new home for mom’s.

Most importantly, there has to be time for emotional care and connection with my family members each day. These are the care-work tasks - listening as my 9-year-old describes his tough night at soccer practice, setting limits on my 5-year-old’s tantrums, knowing when my mom needs a hug.

According to many people in my life, I am doing a great job “managing this difficult time.” (Though a friend of mine said, with a much-appreciated infusion of dark humor, “I’d like to praise your ability to be a cockroach and endure.”) My kids call me “the CEO of our family,” a moniker that makes me feel appreciated, but doesn’t capture what I do. Our family is not a profit-driven entity working towards efficient production of a product, but rather a system of caregivers and receivers.

If I have any special capabilities in handling all the tasks on my plate right now, it’s thanks to my training as a social worker. Social work, which emerged in the early 20th century in response to the extreme suffering of the poor in capitalist, industrial urban centers, created a profession to care for people in need. Professionalizing care means that attunement to someone’s suffering and needs is “assessment.” Attending to those needs and easing their suffering happens through categories of service provision such as “goal setting,” “guidance filling out public assistance applications,” “medication monitoring,” “coaching in self-advocacy,” and “supportive counseling.” The last is a catch-all for caring about someone’s feelings and interacting with them in a healing way that’s as vague as the word “parenting.”

In my first social work job, I was a case manager in a supportive housing complex in Manhattan where formerly homeless individuals diagnosed with mental illness could be placed in affordable studio apartments. I was responsible for the cleanliness and safety of their apartments, the payment of all bills on time, their adherence to medical recommendations, and their prosocial behavior in the building. A day might involve a trip to buy socks and underwear with one client, a counseling session with another about the long history of alcohol abuse in his family, and an afternoon medication monitoring session with a third to watch him take his mood stabilizer.

I learned to make effective use of to-do lists and also to accustom myself to constantly shifting and adjusting plans. I would often need to drop everything if a client fell and needed to go to the hospital, or a co-worker was out sick and needed me to take on their clients for the day. I needed to accomplish everything critical by 5 pm. If that sounds overwhelming, it was, and I left agency practice after 8 years.

My observation is that every parent today is a social worker (and it follows that social work is actually professional parenting.) Every parent is asked to be responsible for everything under the sun. To navigate our Byzantine institutions successfully and with aplomb so that kids can go to camp and a widowed parent can finance assisted living, and then to talk to those kids about how hard it feels to go to camp without having a friend there yet, and to allow the widowed parent to vent her anger about needing this kind of help. Care work is all-inclusive, the practical and the emotional bleeding together.

Social workers are taught to try to change faulty systems and also to learn to navigate them in the meantime, to seek help in that process, and to do good things for ourselves so we don’t burn out under the pressure. So that is why my to-do list today includes things like “journal,” “plan a FUN activity for the weekend,” “finish book,” and “ask James (my husband) to pick up dessert.” A lot of my to-do list of care work will continue to beat me up, and I'll probably never shake its tyranny. But now some of those bullet items are there, so I get some of the care, too.

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One witchy thing